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Friday, June 28, 2019

Mulberries are falling and staining the sidewalks around town, and
you can hear the flocks of birds among the branches. Mulberry picking is
easy--the ripe berries almost fall into your bucket, or you can spread a
tarp under a small tree and give it a hearty shake to make it rain
berries.

I ran the mulberries through our Roma food mill 3 times
to extract the juice and pulp, while removing the seeds and stems. This
is the juice/pulp from which we would normally make jam, but we decided to try a few other things as well this year.

Mulberry marzipan

First, Robert made some mulberry marzipan, sticking a single slivered
almond into the end of the shaped paste to mimic the small stem. The
flavor is subtle because you don't need too much liquid when making
marzipan from scratch.

Mulberry agar jelly jewels

The second thing we tried was mulberry
jelly jewels, made using agar-agar as a gelling agent and pouring the
mixture into silicone molds. Once the agar firms up, I just popped them
out of the molds. In one batch, I used mulberry juice with a touch of
lemon juice added, in the second batch I mixed in a little coconut milk
to make them creamier and lighter purple. They are small enough to pop
them in your mouth, one at a time.

Thursday, June 6, 2019

When we teach edible mushroom classes, we praise the chicken mushroom
(Laetiporus sulphureus, L. cincinnatus) as a very good edible mushroom.
It's not so much that the mushroom tastes like chicken, but its texture
mimics meat in a satisfactory way. We find that the chicken mushroom
can be one of the most versatile wild fungi when it comes to making
meals, standing in for meat in many cases or just being used on its own.
Another reason we like it so much is that chicken mushrooms
can fruit in spring, summer, or in the fall, giving us many
opportunities to utilize this mushroom in different preparations. With
this week's spring chicken find, I ground some in the food processor to make spicy patties with rice,
scallions, garlic, chopped nettles, and hot spices. We served the
patties in steamed buns with some gochujang sauce, fresh radishes from
our farm share, and cilantro.

white chicken

It's very important that the chicken is collected in good condition,
when it is still young or tender. Coming upon an old chicken mushroom
can be disappointing, but you should never be tempted to use it
anyway--it will be like eating sawdust. Ideally, you want the flesh to
ooze yellow or milky juice when cut into, the colors to be bright, and
the fronds to be bug-free. Sometimes the overall mushroom can be very,
very large, or just a few fronds on the side of a tree. This fungus
starts out looking like spray foam on the tree, before it shelves out.
You will find the yellow chicken mushroom growing from the trunk of a
dead or dying tree, as it is a heartwood rotter. The white chickens are
found at the bases of dead or dying trees, as they rot the butt wood.
Chicken mushrooms are polypores, which means there are "many pores" on
the undersides of the fronds, although you may need to use magnification
to see the small pores.

When we find an excessive amount of
chicken mushroom, we cook it and freeze the cooked parts in vacuum
packed bags. Dehydration is not ideal for this fungus, as it becomes
woody and does not rehydrate well because the context of this polypore
is constructed of skeletal hyphae which harden into a dense substance
when dried. Sometimes large finds end up in a recipe and brought to a
weekend foray to share for lunch. We also make and freeze many vegan
"sausages" made with ground chicken mushrooms, gluten, and seasonings to
use all year long. You can find a list of some of our recipes using chicken mushrooms here.

Friday, May 10, 2019

In spring, we need to start emptying out the freezer of last season's
stored bounty but also crave freshly foraged green goodies.

Here we combined some of autumn's maitake mushrooms (Grifola frondosa)
that we had frozen pre-cooked and ground with brown rice, chopped ramps
greens, seasonings, and an egg as a binder to make a baked patty. Then I
baked some biscuits made with added pureed ramps greens and chopped
ramps greens added to the dough. We served them with pickled beets
made from last year's CSA share. It seems likely that many dinners for
the next month or two will include wild foods pulled from our freezer or
pantry to make some space!

Thursday, May 9, 2019

The "official" morel season seems to be underway in Connecticut and
southern New England, even though we still don't find too many. Why? Is
the soil wrong? Are the trees wrong? What is up with the weather? Who
knows, not me!

But, when we head out for other assorted forages
(for nettles, ramps greens, asparagus, immature knotweed, or pokeweed
shoots), we still ramble around and examine the grounds and forests for
morels, likely Morchella americana, the yellow morel.

With limited
experience with morels, we often dehydrate them to concentrate their
flavor upon re-hydration, or cook them fresh very simply. A light
batter and fry is the popular default, cooking in a wine and cream sauce
is standard, and stuffing large morels that have been halved seems like
a good idea.

Morchella americana in various stages of development. Not really any such thing as "greys" or "blondes"

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Some warmer weather is finally signalling the Ganoderma tsugae to
fruit. We find them on eastern hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis), dead or
nearly dead trunks. Our eastern hemlocks are under a lot of pressure
from several sources that are killing them in large numbers: from the
woolly hemlock adelgid--an invasive insect; to various fungal blights
and infections--tip blight, twig blight, needle rusts. The amount of
dead hemlock trees is steadily increasing, creating more substrate for the "hemlock reishi", or "varnish shelf" fungus.

Fresh fruiting body, soft and tender at this stage

Ganoderma tsugae is a white rot or butt rot of the heartwood for the
hemlock tree. It can act like a parasite on live trees and a saprobe on
dead hemlock wood. The fruiting body is a firm polypore that shelves out
horizontally from the substrate, sometimes in large colonies. The top
of the fruiting body comes in a range of colors that changes as it
ages--starting out with white on the tender new growth and edges, then
darkening through yellow, orange, reddish-orange, and finally a darker
reddish-brown after sporulation or with age and weathering. The top of
the cap also appears very shiny, almost as if it were lacquered. The
fan-shaped cap can grow up to 10" wide, but more often the caps are
about 4-7" wide, and there is often a stem present where the cap
attaches to the wood that is up to 1" thick. The fresh pore surface is
white; it gets a dirty reddish-tan with age and often supports a colony
of green mold or algae. There are many cool insects and beetles that
live on old Ganoderma conks, so there is really no need to remove old
fruiting bodies from the wood.

Many people in the eastern part
of North America where Ganoderma tsugae is abundant love to claim that
Ganoderma tsugae is the true "reishi" fungus of Chinese medicinal lore,
seemingly a cure for every cancer, malady, and even a fountain of youth
treatment. Those same people are more than happy to try and sell some
dried "reishi" to you to make a bitter decoction or some tinctured
"reishi", making some pretty big promises as the efficacy of the fungus.
We don't really get into medicinal fungi, but the actual "reishi"
fungus is a different species--Ganoderma lucidum, and any actual
scientific studies into the possible benefits of "reishi" are in regards
to Ganoderma lucidum.

Very young fruiting body, sliced and pan-ready

In the spring, when the fresh growth is
still white with no hint of any lacquered color showing or any signs of
pores, we collect the marshmallow-y fruiting body to eat as a fresh
mushroom. The mushroom should be incredibly tender--it gets tough very
quickly with any hint of color or once it gets too big. The white blobs
get sliced thinly, cooked with a touch of oil over medium heat until
they brown, then hit with a sprinkle of salt for a taste of a mushroom
that contains a lot of meaty flavor in a small slice.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Spring is a great time to get out and forage for greens and sprouts,
but a lean time for most mushrooms. Only a few edible fungi dare to show
up in our area of southern New England; the hunting doesn't get
*really* exciting until July or so. While we are grateful to finally get
outside and for the snow to be gone, we do still cast our eyes
downwards in the eternal search for dinner.
The springtime
mushroom most people know and are desperately hunting for is the morel,
one of the Morchella species. We mostly find the larger yellows,
Morchella americana, sometimes the smaller Morchella diminutiva that are
associated with tulip trees, and we have personally never found any of
the earlier black morels. It is important to distinguish true morels
from false morels--true morels will be completely hollow when sliced in
half, while false morels will have many convoluted chambers in the top
and stem. False morels do contain a fatal toxin that accumulate in your
body over time if you do not remove it with thorough cooking, and we
just have better things to do than chance our lives to things like that
rather than argue with folks who insist they have been eating them their
whole lives with no problems. True morels also need to be cooked well
to prevent stomach upset, and they dry well to concentrate their flavor
for use later. They pair well with a a splash of marsala or white wine, a
touch of salt, allow the excess liquid in the mushrooms to cook off,
and add a knob of butter at the end. (there shouldn't be bugs, and if
there are specks of dirt, brush them off or spray them with the hose on
your sink, never soak your mushrooms in salt water!!).

Cornmeal and ramps waffles with marsala and morel gravy

Biscuits made with ramps greens and morel butter

We just
don't have as many morels here in New England as the lucky folks in the
Midwest have, it is a fact. The soil, the trees, and the the climate is
different. We also don't follow forest fires like they do in the Pacific
Northwest or California, the species of morels are different. So what
are we looking for? Our northeastern morels are often associated with
elms, ash trees, tulip poplars, or apple trees. Many of our elms and ash
trees are dying from diseases and insect infestations, so I don't know
if the morels prefer the trees sick. Unfortunately, the old apple
orchards were treated with fairly toxic pesticides until fairly recently
and fungi are really good bio-accumulators, so morels found in old
orchard may be high in toxic elements, so eaters beware. Or, like all
life forms, they can grow wherever they want to, flaunting all rules and
confounding all predictions anyone wants to make! Just get out in the
woods and walk the miles! Morels are members of the ascomycota, meaning
they have a different way of spreading their spores than most other
fungi. The cap portion will be yellow or light brown, pitted or look
like a honeycomb, and hollow when sliced in half, The stem will be light
cream colored and hollow when sliced in half. Morels grow on the
ground.

On to the second common edible wild mushroom of spring,
sometimes thought of as inedible or as the consolation prize when your
morel hunt doesn't go well--the pheasant back or the dryad's saddle,
Cerioporus squamosus. A lot of people think of them as inedible because
they are collecting them in the wrong stage, when they are far
too large! If it has shelved out and you can see the pores easily, and
it is difficult to run your knife through the edge, it is too late. The
mushroom will be the consistency of shoe leather and taste fairly bad at
this point and actually IS inedible. If you find the pheasant backs
when they are in their "pig's nose" stage, the pores are almost too
small to see and you knife should cut through like a hot knife through
butter, they will be incredibly tender. The flavor is very light and
almost sweet and meaty at the same time, and it can stand up to any
strong flavor you choose to throw at it. At this tender stage, you can
cut the mushroom into any shape; slices, strips, cubes, grind it, then
cook it several ways and season it several ways to utilize it as a meat
substitute in any dish--very versatile!

Breaded and deep fried with some yellow tomato sauce

Pheasant backs are
polypores, so they have many pores on their undersides. The tops of the
caps look like the wings of a pheasant, I suppose, with slightly hairy
tufts. They are saprobic, growing on dying or dead trees, and in our
area, seem to love maples especially. The fruiting bodies will often
hang around on the trees all year, getting tougher, and sometimes some
newer growth will show up again as the weather cools back down in the
fall. In older guide books, they are listed as Polyporus squamosus.

"pigs nose" stage, perfect for collection

finely chopped and cooked in a spicy sauce, then serve in Japanese temaki rolls

Thursday, April 4, 2019

After
the cold winter the spring greens and shoots are a bit slow to emerge.
We find ourselves turning our faces up towards the sun on the nice days,
warming our cheeks. Looking down at the ground for signs of life is
second nature for us as we take short walks along muddy trails, and we
are even taking note of the swelling buds of the trees. Not long now
before we begin another year of enjoying our scavenger hunt for edible
plants and fungi, where the prizes are delicious!

Those
pesky yard onions, Allium vineale! Use them like chives, in potato
salad, on baked potatoes, in a savory quick bread, in soups, grill the
small bulbs until they sweeten, just use them up!

Hairy
bittercress, Cardamine hirisuta, a small plant in the mustard family.
The leaves and flowers are peppery and bright in salads.

Ostrich
fern fiddleheads, Matteuccia struthiopteris, are the only species of
fern fiddleheads we eat. They are growing more scarce in our area of
southern New England due to habitat loss, so we only collect enough for a
single meal each season. Further north into eastern Canada, they thrive
in the wide open river floodplains. Sustainability is key- only collect
half of the fiddles per crown, and never more than you need.

Tender
and mild chickweed, Stellaria media. These have been out for awhile, ad
they'll be good eating until it gets too warm and they go leggy. Eat
raw and add to smoothies, or add last minute to soups to keep the green
color.

Common
daylily shoots, Hemerocallis fulva. Sautee these with a toucg of sesame
oil and soy sauce for a quick side dish of greens. The tubers are good
to collect in spring as well, and we can look forward to the edible
flower buds, flowers, and wilted flowers later in the season.

Stinging
nettle shoots, Urtica species, packed full of iron. These are my
personal spring tonic, and we collect them for soups and to add to
smoothies raw, dry some for a seasoning powder, and dry some for
tisanes.

Dryad's
saddle mushrooms, Cerioporus squamosus, a wood rotting polypore of
spring that can be delicious when collected young. Look for them on big,
old maples and make sure your knife cuts through them easily, otherwise
it will be too tough for the plate. They are well flavored with just a
sautee and a touch of salt, but meaty enough to stand up to stronger
spices like Korean gochujang.

Invasive
garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, showing the start of the second
year's growth almost ready to set up a flower stalk, plus first year's
growth of sprouts from the many seeds this plant produces. Eat it
all--greens, leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, sprouts.

Ramps
greens, Allium tricoccum. Collect sustainably--one leaf per plant,
don't dig the bulbs! A pungent burst of garlic and onions in a
chlorophyll filled green leaf, intense flavor for all dishes and a puree
that keeps in the freezer for use all year.

Yellow
rocket, Barbarea vulgaris, another member of the mustard family. Spring
is when the greens are tender, and the flower heads cook up like
broccoli rabe. A touch bitter, but a good green for cooking.